gizmodo.com — If you were wondering what the difference between Sprint, Verizon and Cingular's high speed cellular data network was, you've come to the right place. A Sprint employee did a comparison of the three, pitting them in a deathmatch based on coverage, performance, terms of service, and pricing.
Oct 7, 2006 View in Crawl 4
squirrel83Oct 7, 2006
summ it up a little. . . Number of distinct contiguous metro markets partially covered by high speed wireless carriers:Sprint: 155+Verizon: 95+Cingular: 16+Alltel: 11+SprintEVDO Coverage claimed: 158m+ population reported . As of Feb, Sprint claims 220 markets but it's really only 150+ contiguous distinct markets with significant coverage. Sprint plans to rollout to 200m+ pops by end of 2006 and nearly entire voice network by end of 2007. Sprint has all 1900mhz towers and appears to have more EVDO capacity. Click here for EVDO Coverage Map. Orange is current EVDO coverage, Yellow is future (by end of 2006 to early 2007).VerizonEVDO Coverage claimed: 153m+ population reported . As of Feb, Verizon claims 180+ markets but it's really only 95+ contiguous distinct markets. Verizon has future markets now showing on maps but unknown when they target to complete. Verizon has a mix of 800/1900mhz towers. For exclusive 800mhz markets that do have EVDO, performances avgs may be lower as there is likely not as much capacity for EVDO in 800mhz markets. If considering Verizon EVDO, may want to check if 1900mhz towers are in your area. Click here for EVDO Coverage Map - select Vcast.CingularHSDPA Coverage claimed: Under 20 major markets. Initial plans were to expand to 100 markets by end of 2006 but lately they've been saying 'most major markets' for 2006. Some are also apparently only getting slower UMTS, not HSDPA. UMTS/HSDPA is not GSM based and therefore is a significant, more costly upgrade for cellsites. Will be interesting to see what % of network becomes HSDPA in a couple years. PC World Review suggests the coverage maps are less than honest.